The Caribou-Poker Creeks Research Watershed (CPCRW) is located in the Yukon-Tanana Uplands of the Northern Plateaus Physiographic Province (Wahrhaftig 1965), near the town of Chatanika in interior Alaska. It is centered on 65o10' N latitude and 147o30' W longitude, and can be found on the Livengood A-1 and A-2 USGS 1:63,360 topographic map quadrangles. The Yukon-Tanana Uplands are a region of northeast-trending, round-topped ridges with gentle slopes. The elevations of these ridges range from 450 to 900 meters with rises of 150 to 500 meters above the adjacent valley bottoms. The alluvial-covered valley floors are generally flat (Wahrhaftig 1965).
The CPCRW basin is a northeast-southwest trending oval about 16 kilometers and eight kilometers wide. The total area of the watershed is about 104 km2, with the Caribou Creek drainage comprising about 40 percent of the area. Elevations within CPCRW range from 210 meters at Poker Creek near the Chatanika River to 826 meters at the northern part of the watershed.